Category: Daily Campaign Update

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

The Left is now eating its own. – Hollywood producer of mediocre films and general high muckety-muck Harvey Weinstein was revealed by the news fakers at the New York Times on Wednesday to be a serial woman abuser who has entered into at least 8 settlements of sexual harassment lawsuits over the last quarter century. This story was apparently real – it’s not about Donald Trump or Russia, after all – because Weinstein felt the need to issue a standard progressive non-apology apology later in the day that sounded like it came right out of the Bill Clinton playbook. Which is appropriate, given that Weinstein has been a big donor to both Clintons, Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi and many other Democrat luminaries during the same years in which he was abusing women.

Progressive activists began demanding that all these Democrat politicians donate any contributions received from Weinstein over the years to various women’s charities. Thus far, only Sen. Patrick Leahy has chosen to do so, though we can expect some others to do the same. But those who expect anyone named Clinton to give back any money for which they spent all those years shamelessly clawing and grasping is likely to be disappointed. Hell, Bill’s still trying to figure out what all the fuss is about here.

And then there’s Carolina Panthers QB Cam Newton, who has become a hero of the unpatriotic left in recent weeks by engaging in various acts of disrespect to the flag during the playing of the national anthem. Turns out that one can be a progressive hero only so long as one does not violate the norms of political correctness. In a press conference on Wednesday, Newton made a snarky, insulting remark in response to a question about receivers running routes from a female reporter, an act for which he definitely deserves to be reprimanded. But oh, my, a reprimand is the least of Cam’s worries.

This is what happens when you lie down with dogs. – Cam has now become public enemy number 1 among the hard left contingent that now infests America’s sports media at all levels. So much so that he has begun to lose sponsors as a result of all the negative media he is getting. Thus, Mr. Newton has now forfeited all the weeks of hard work disrespecting Old Glory and the Star Spangled Banner with a single dim-witted misogynistic slip of the tongue. These athletes are going to find their new progressive masters to be very demanding of their personal behavior. Tough.

Wait, they’re giving us what we want? Why, they can’t do that! – All the fake reporters and talking heads in the fake news media spent Tuesday through mid-day Thursday screaming at the top of their fake lungs about the need to get rid of Bump Stocks, the shooter’s toy that enabled the Las Vegas murderer to effectively turn semi-automatic weapons into fully-automatic guns. But then the NRA, early Thursday afternoon, issued a statement supporting a review by the BATF to determine whether or not these toys really are in compliance with federal law (as someone we all know and love had suggested they do on Wednesday evening), and all the fake reporters and fake talking heads stopped in mid-scream, looked around and said “Wait, what?”

So they all fumbled around for about 2 hours until new talking points could be developed at Fake News Central, and by 3:00 they were all saying in unison that “Well, you can ban bump stocks, but don’t think that’s going to be the end of this!” And then they all started chanting in their best Tibetan Monk tones “We need universal background checks. We must have universal background checks. We need universal background checks. We must have…” ok, you get it.

They always go to universal background checks, for two reasons: 1) they don’t really have anything else, and 2) because they love to recite the phrase “Gun show loophole.” It sort of rhymes, and all progressives are just frustrated poets with very mean streaks. In the current case, this progressive monk-ish chant ignores the reality that the Las Vegas killer, during the course of his career – which included stints at the IRS and with at least one defense contractor – and in accumulating his arsenal of firearms has reportedly submitted to more than 2 dozen FBI background checks during his adult life, and passed them all. In other words, this is just one more meaningless Democrat/fake news media talking point designed to mislead the public.

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

The Army Times is reporting this morning that three U.S. Army Green Berets were killed yesterday in Niger. My immediate question upon hearing that news is why in the hell do we have Green Berets in Niger? Why in the hell do we continue to see our young men and women brought back to our country from non-strategic, far-off, perpetually unstable countries like Niger in body bags? Now we have three more sets of American parents, spouses, brothers and sisters who must grieve the loss of their loved ones while wondering the same things I’m wondering.

One of the issues Donald Trump campaigned on was a promise to re-evaluate America’s ongoing policy of placing our people at risk in places like Niger. He has kept many, many promises so far, but this is one his administration has yet to get around to doing. Today would be a good time to jump-start that process.

Here’s how our national news media has changed in the last 70 years: During WWII and the administration of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. military was able to trust American journalists covering the war with foreknowledge of planned operations for the coming days and weeks, because they were American patriots who loved their country. Isn’t that an amazing, almost unbelievable thing in light of the disgraceful, anti-American behavior we see in the fake news media today? But it really is true.

During the early 1960s, the U.S. news media coordinated to refuse to report their knowledge that President John F. Kennedy was having an affair with Judith Campbell Exner, who was also involved with mob boss Sam Giancana. NBC knew about it at the time, as did CBS, ABC, the New York Times, Time Magazine and the Washington Post. But those media outlets all approved of John Kennedy and all thus agreed to keep the matter – which placed the U.S. president at great peril of being blackmailed – secret from the American public.

During the Clinton Administration, the Drudge Report was just an obscure news accumulator site until it became the first news outlet to report the fact that Slick Willie was having an affair with one of his interns in the Oval Office. We found out later that several fake reporters at major mainstream media outlets had had that story, but sat on it for months until the Drudge revelation force them to actually do their jobs.

Fast forward to 2017, and we have NBC News issuing a report Tuesday morning, based on nothing but the alleged statements of several unidentified sources, that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson got angry at his boss – President Trump – one day, referred to him as a “moron”, and considered quitting his job until he was counseled by Vice President Mike Pence. Given NBC News’ track record for eagerly filing any false story that its fake editors and fake reporters believe would be harmful to this President and his Administration, the public can have no confidence whatsoever that any of NBC’s alleged “sources” really said that to its fake reporter, or if indeed these “sources” really even exist.

But there it is. And so, the Secretary of State, his staff and press spokesperson, the Vice President and his staff, and even the President of the United States of America and his staff had to take time out of their incredibly busy schedules on Tuesday to refute a story that is an absolute disgrace to journalism, and which the same fake reporters and fake editors would have never even considered filing in any Democrat administration. To make it all even more disgusting, the President was peppered with questions about this disgrace of a non-story by leering fake reporters while he was in Las Vegas on a mission to comfort the families of the victims of Sunday’s mass shooting in that city, and to thank the police officers and others who intervened to prevent further loss of life.

Even if the story were true, think about what it actually is: an employee who gets pissed off at his boss and calls him a “moron” behind his back in a fit of pique, and threatens to quit. I know this doesn’t apply to many, many lefties, but who among those of us who have had to work for a living during our lives has not gotten angry at a boss at some point and grumbled that he or she was a “moron”, an “idiot”, or my own favorite, a “raging dimwit”? Yes, I’ve gotten mad at a boss or two in the past myself, and I’ve been incredibly lucky in the people I’ve had the pleasure of working for.

At the end of the day, all I could think of was this: Is there a lower way to make a living in America today than to be a fake journalist faking the news at one of these fake news outlets? I can’t think of one. Can you?

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

If I were Donald Trump, I think that right this very minute I would be instructing my staff to find a way I could reverse the legalization of bump stocks administratively, either via an executive order or by instructing the ATF to reverse its 2010 decision approving them.

This would have all sorts of benefits:

Trump gets the credit, denying any Democrat that pleasure;

Trump drives the news media absolutely insane, as they desperately search for a way to condemn him for doing exactly what they want done;

Trump demonstrates to the public yet again that he can get things done outside of the normal morass of the DC Swamp;

Trump shuts down any further debate on restricting firearms for the time being.

You’ll certainly get sued by angry AR-15 owners, but even if you ultimately get overruled by the Supreme Court 5-6 years from now, who cares? You’ve taken action, done the right thing in the eyes of most Americans, and driven every progressive idiot in the entire country stark, raving mad while doing so.

It’s a win, win, win for everybody but the Democrats, the news media and a handful of semi-automatic gun owners who think they just have to have a machine gun.

I’m not for gun control, and completely against negotiating with Democrats on the subject, but bump stocks aren’t guns, and this approach would involve no Democrat input at all.

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

These events never work out the way the fake news media want them to. – President Trump, as promised, visited the ravaged island of Puerto Rico on Tuesday, and everyone at CNN and NBC was horrified to see him enthusiastically received by grateful Puerto Ricans. San Juan’s Marxist Mayor Cruz wore spiked heels to the joint briefing with the President, and no one at Vanity Fair or the New York times tossed a fit about it. Go figure.

In other news, I had an email from a lefty friend late yesterday, an email that ended with an expression of this person’s feeling that “we really need to have a national dialogue about guns.” That sounded suspiciously like the leftist talking point started by Tom Brokaw Monday morning and parroted by pretty much every Democrat politician and fake journalist who can still utter coherent sentences – which obviously excludes Nancy Pelosi – but I didn’t say that to this person.

Instead, my reply was very brief: “Ok, I’ll start. You can’t have my guns. Great talk.” Thus, my lefty friend may now be just a lefty acquaintance, I’m not sure, since I never got a reply. I suppose I’ll find out in due time.

But whatever, this is really the only reply conservatives can offer to lefties on this subject, for one simple reason: the leftist heart is not pure on this subject. Well, ok, the leftist heart is not pure on any subject, but on gun control it is especially not pure.

This lack of purity of intentions becomes manifestly obvious every time we have a tragic event like the Las Vegas massacre, and every leftwinger in the country knee jerks to offering logic-devoid sophistries about the “need for more gun control” before we even know the name of the maniac who perpetrated the act, much less anything about his background or how he acquired his weapons.

The Las Vegas shooter is a great example of leftists’ lockstep refusal to deal with facts. Due to his work history, which included stints at the U.S. Postal Service, the IRS and a defense contractor, and in the process of legally acquiring his massive stash of firearms, we now know this scumbag somehow managed to pass more than 30 FBI background checks during his life. He obtained his guns in states with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, dotted every ‘I’, crossed every ‘T’, and was able to accumulate an arsenal. Yet I heard half a dozen leftwing idiot politicians, such as the execrable valor thief Richard Blumenthal, talk about the need for more background checks when obtaining firearms. Which part of “30 FBI background checks” do you not understand, Senator?

But of course, Blumenthal gets a pass from the fake news media, which is uniformly parroting the same false narrative, because enhanced background checks are not the real agenda here. If you give Blumenthal his enhanced background checks, and give Chuck Schumer his desire to outlaw “bump stocks”, then the next time there is a mass shooting perpetrated by some guy who passed all the background checks to legally acquire his firearms, Dick and Chuck are just going to come back wanting something else that won’t have any effect other than robbing law-abiding citizens of more of their freedoms.

Note to all conservatives thinking about offering concessions to these people: The real agenda is LEFTISTS WANT TO TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY FROM YOU. That’s it. That’s where they all want to go, that’s what is in their hearts and minds, and everything they do and say related to this issue is designed to get them to that point.

If you gave Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders 30 seconds to be dictator of America, the one thing he or she would get done in that 30 seconds would be to rescind the 2nd Amendment and send an army of jack-booted, bullet-proof vest-wearing, ironically gun-toting thugs into your home to forcibly take away all of your guns and leave you defenseless. Because leftists believe that only the jack-booted, bullet-proof vest wearing, ironically gun-toting thugs loyal to them should be able to tote guns in our society.

And don’t think this is really about preventing atrocities like what took place in Las Vegas Sunday. Hell, if it was about that, they’d be trying to ban big white trucks, since a radical Islamic terrorist killed 86 people in Nice last year with a big white truck.

This is about control. Not gun control, just control. Leftists want to control you. They think they are smarter than you, better than you, know better than you do how you should live your life, and think they should be able to dictate all of that to you. They honestly do. This is how their minds work. It’s how they are wired.

This is the real nature of leftism: It’s a mental disorder. Throughout the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, the implementation of leftism in any society has inevitably led to a violent end. Venezuela is just the latest in a very long line of nations to sadly experience this inevitable progression. The first two steps in such a progression are always 1) the government takeover of the news media, which was already 90% achieved during the Obama Administration, and 2) the disarming of the public.

Guess where we are in that progression?

Offering concessions to these people is no different than offering concessions to Lenin, or Hitler, or Mao, or Castro or Hugo Chavez: The next time there’s an incident, they’re always going to want more concessions, and every concession is just one more step down the road to their ultimate, true goal.

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

The big news out of the National Football League this morning is that every player on both teams stood for the moment of silence honoring the memories of the victims of the Las Vegas massacre. Imagine that: 106 millionaire prima donas and not a one of them picked that for their personal “look at me” moment. Even better, all 53 Washington Redskins actually stood for the national anthem, although 2 Chiefs felt the need to sit and look stupid. Nobody really knew why they were sitting, and probably they really didn’t, either.

In other, less important and less media-covered NFL news, the Chiefs won the game.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, authorities continue to search for a motive for the mass shooting. Even though ISIS took credit for the assault, claiming the man was a recent convert to Islam, the LVPD and other investigating agencies claim to have found no evidence yet to support any terrorist affiliation. ISIS also took credit for a casino attack earlier this year which authorities believe was actually a botched robbery, so there is reason to be at least skeptical of the group’s claim in this case.

Already, an official narrative is becoming clear in this case. Such narratives always follow a familiar line in these mass murder cases and assassinations: the guy was a “loner”, he “kept to himself”, he was “just a regular guy”, and no one in his family, none of his friends, nor anyone in his neighborhood had any idea at all that he was a raging psychopath. Yep, this guy had somehow accumulated an arsenal roughly equivalent to that of the Bulgarian Army, was carrying what he needed to make a huge fertilizer bomb in his car, and spent four days carting firearms and ammunition into his comped suite at the Mandalay Bay, and nobody had any idea at all that he was up to something.

Folks, I can’t take a walk without 15 people in my neighborhood knowing about it. This guy lived in a closely-packed retirement community filled with nosy senior citizens. But we are supposed to believe that he was able to build a stockpile of firearms and explosives that would fill your local National Guard Armory and nobody had any idea.

59 Americans are dead as I write this. Many more remain in critical condition at Las Vegas hospitals. More than 500 were wounded in the assault. These victims, their families and other loved ones, the people of Las Vegas and everyone else in America deserve to learn the truth about what happened.

It would be a real benefit to our society if the local officials – who seem to be doing a fantastic job – could be allowed a few days to accumulate and examine the evidence available, interview the man’s friends, family and neighbors, and conduct a full investigation without the creeps at CNN and the major TV networks pushing out a cookie-cutter narrative that may or may not have any real basis in reality.

Americans deserve better than this.

Speaking of Americans deserving better, it took Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats about 15 minutes to start politicizing the Las Vegas tragedy into yet another assault on the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution. The Most Corrupt Woman In America was on her Twitter account before noon on Monday (she got up early), tweeting out ignorant nonsense (what else is new?) designed to stir up her followers for another push for blaming the inanimate objects for the actions of another mad man.

Ms. Clinton has obviously watched too many episodes of Hawaii 5-0, since she obviously believes that “silencers” actually make guns emit no sound. This rank ignorance led her to tweet, “The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get.” As one expert pointed out a little later, putting suppressors on the guns this guy used would have still emitted a noise level roughly equal to that of a jackhammer. Also, it probably would have been a blessing had the guy tried to use suppressors, since they would have likely made his guns overheat and fail before they finished firing their first clip.

But Democrats never let facts get in the way of a good narrative. Thus,within a few hours, pretty much every “leader” of the national Democrat Party weighed in with their own personal brands of ignorance and demagoguery. All in keeping with the Democrat motto, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” even when there are 59 dead bodies involved.

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

[Today’s Update is written with a very heavy heart as video of last night’s mass shooting in Las Vegas streams across my television screen. With more than 50 people already dead at the hands of a mad man, let’s all pray for the recovery of the hundreds of wounded, dozens of whom are in critical condition at local Las Vegas hospitals. What a tragedy.]

Is that a threat, or a promise? – Ohio Governor John Kasich, appearing on CNN on Sunday, told fake journalist Jake Tapper that he is considering leaving the Republican Party if it doesn’t change. Republicans everywhere, upon hearing the terminally annoying son of a postman’s remarks, wondered how they could help speed along this process. Democrats, meanwhile, cowered in fear at the prospect of having an aging Kasich wandering around their meetings and conventions, drinking cocktail glasses filled with sugared milk and asking them “have I ever told you my dad worked at the post office?

Mayor Cruz, your 15 minutes are up. – Democrats in Washington apparently got some bad polling data on the antics of the Crazy Little Marxist Mayor of San Juan late on Sunday, because the Mayor’s talking points related to the Trump Administration’s recovery and support efforts, and even towards the President himself, changed on Sunday evening. After spending 90% of the weekend complaining that the thousands of first responders sent to her Island were providing no help at all, she told MSNBC a late Sunday interview that great progress was suddenly being made. Also, after saying all sorts of nasty things about President Trump on Friday, Saturday and most of the day Sunday, she told the same interviewer that “I wasn’t saying anything nasty about the President.”

Any communications professional (I am one) can easily see that Mayor Cruz is a puppet being told what to say and how to say it by someone behind the scenes. She has clearly been coached, provided talking points, given clothes to wear, staging advice, etc. It is obvious that, on Friday, the Democrats and their fake journalist tools at CNN and MSNBC got together and decided they could do great harm to President Trump by pretending the federal aid and recovery effort that succeeded so massively in Texas, Louisiana and Florida was somehow failing in Puerto Rico.

It is equally obvious that, on Sunday, somebody among this Democrat/Media fake news complex got hold of some data that this was all backfiring on them, and changed the Marxist Mayor’s talking points and demeanor. As I wrote in yesterday’s Update, Americans are not going to respond well to a clearly craven politician lying about the efforts of thousands of first responders who are sacrificing so much to try to save lives in Puerto Rico. It’s quite obvious that that’s exactly what happened.

This same outcome could have come about related to Katrina if George W. Bush understood the value of hitting back twice as hard whenever the fake news media attacked him. But President Bush was a captive of a set of terrible media advisers and had far too much of his patrician father in him to do that. President Trump has neither problem, obviously.

The tragic mass shooting in Las Vegas will now give the fake journalists at CNN and MSNBC the opportunity to pivot away from their backfiring “Puerto Rico is Trump’s Katrina” narrative, and focus on a new “let’s blame the inanimate object for the horrific actions of a mad man” narrative that they will inevitably push, while also trying to blame it all on President Trump. So the nation will now be treated to a week of vicious panel discussions and ignorant pontificators over gun control. Isn’t that lovely.

The Crazy Little Marxist Mayor has had her 15 minutes of fame, and is fortunate that the fake news media will now drop her like a hot potato. She allowed herself to become the willing tool of very bad people who did not have her own interests in mind, and had been placed in a no-win situation as a result. Perhaps now that her 15 minutes are over, she will actually focus on working with the federal authorities who who have been sent to her island to help, and who really do have her – and her people’s – best interests at heart. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

If I’m going to call Kim Jong Un the Crazy Little Fat Guy, I suppose I should start referring to San Juan, Puerto Rico Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz Soto as the Crazy Little Marxist Lady, since the nickname totally fits and I suspect we’re going be hearing lots more from this prime example of public ineptitude in the coming days and weeks.

After trying and utterly failing to find a public figure – any old public figure would have done – willing to lie about the incredibly well-organized and effective responses by FEMA and the rest of the Trump Administration to the epic disasters created by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, a very frustrated fake news media had spent the first five days after Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico similarly searching in vain, as the Island’s public officials all told a familiar tale: Everything we ask the Administration for, we receive in spades.

But then folks at the national Democrat Party obviously got to the Crazy Little Marxist Lady, fed her some talking points, and suddenly on Friday the fake news media had found their poster child for their unending efforts to make this Donald Trump’s Katrina. Despite the fact that the Island’s governor and 77 of 78 mayors continue to praise the response efforts, CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the nation’s fake news media spent the entire weekend focusing solely on Ms. Soto and her obviously irrational claims.

Here’s a hint to Ms. Soto: If you’re going to hold a presser in which you claim your people are starving, and that it’s all President Trump’s fault, you probably shouldn’t do it while standing in front of literal mountains of foodstuffs and other supplies that were mostly pre-positioned on your island by President Trump’s people, but which haven’t been delivered because the trucker’s union that you fervently support decided this would be a great time to go on strike.

Hint #2 to the Crazy Little Marxist Lady: If you’re going to claim your island is devastated and that nothing is working there, you might want to avoid wearing an obviously custom-made t-shirt that says “Help us, We are dying,” while conducting a nationally televised interview with Anderson Cooper. Obviously, the “T-Shirts R Us” outlet has electric power. Either that, or the t-shirt was brought to you by Mr. Cooper, which wouldn’t surprise me come to think of it.

Hint #3 to the Crazy Little Marxist Lady and the Democrat Party and the Fake News Media: Donald Trump is not George W. Bush, and Puerto Rico is not Louisiana, circa 2005. Katrina became Bush’s albatross because he was too dimwitted to fight back and defend himself. He stupidly thought the truth would ultimately prevail, and the results of his government’s recovery efforts would redeem him. He was wrong, obviously. Donald Trump won’t make that mistake, as you have already discovered, and he has the means to go over your mendacious heads to get the truth out to the public when you refuse to do so.

Also, unlike Louisiana in 2005, Puerto Rico has, other than the Crazy Little Marxist Lady, competent public officials who really are trying to help their people by working with FEMA, the National Guard, and other first responders, rather than slamming them on national television. Hell, Ms. Soto is even making New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin look less disgusting by comparison. 2017 is a different world in the realm of communications than was 2005, and the fake news media won’t be able to contain and ignore the truth here.

Hint #4 to the Crazy Little Marxist Lady: If you’re going to slam the efforts of first responders, you might want to at least put up the pretense of learning what those efforts are. We found out late Saturday that Ms. Soto has refused to attend a single one of the FEMA-led joint operations meetings, despite the fact that they are held in her own city. The Island’s other 77 mayors and its governor have managed to attend all of them, either in person or via satellite phone, because those 77 mayors and the governor are honestly trying to help their people.

Hint #5 to the Crazy Little Marxist Lady: Americans do not respond well to public officials who lie about and condemn the efforts of tens of thousands of first responders who are trying to save lives. Ms. Soto obviously got this particular memo late Saturday night, as her talking points suddenly changed related to the first responders.

Finally, Hint #6 to the Crazy Little Marxist Lady: You probably don’t realize it yet, but you are in the same position vis a vis President Trump as the Commissioner and owners of the National Football League were in with him last weekend. That confrontation did not work out well for the NFL, which has spent this entire week scrambling to prove it really, really loves the American flag and doesn’t hate America.

You are about to find yourself doing an awful lot of personal damage control in the coming days and weeks. This is a bed you made for yourself. Please enjoy sleeping in it.

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

Well, she was talking about those ‘other’ women –Michelle Obama said that “any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice.” No word from the former First Lady on what she was doing during the 2008 Democrat nominating contest when she actively campaigned for a mean ol’ man against Mrs. Clinton and presumably voted for her husband rather than her “own voice” in the Illinois primary that year.

Tired of winning yet? Part 1 – all the stock indexes closed at all-time record highs yet again on Friday, as the U.S. economy continues to hum along in response to the Trump Administration’s ongoing program to remove the shackles of unnecessary soviet-style regulations that were piled onto it during the Obama years. This has happened so often during the last 8 months that it has become passe’ to even mention it. But there, I mentioned it.

Tired of winning yet? Part II –U.S. GDP for the 2nd quarter of 2017 was raised to a final estimate of 3.1% on Friday, the highest quarterly rate of economic growth in many years. If you want to know why, see the bit about removal of soviet-style regulations above. This is not exactly rocket science.

Because that’s what happens when a Republican charges taxpayers $1 million in air travel in just 8 months – To literally nobody’s surprise, President Trump fired HHS Secretary Tom Price Friday afternoon, after it had been revealed that he felt his entire job was to fly in high style all over the damn world every week at exorbitant taxpayer expense. He apparently didn’t break any laws, and he didn’t do anything myriad Obama officials had not done the past 8 years, but unlike Democrat presidencies, Republican administrations must hold their people accountable for this kind of behavior. Mr. Price apparently didn’t understand that, which means he was too dumb to hold a secretarial position in the first place.

I wrote on Thursday about my belief that the just-begun effort by the GOP establishment leadership in congress to move a tax reform bill is just a Kabuki dance, and that the outcome is already fore-ordained to be a McConnell/Ryan joint presser in December in which they tell us all they did their best but they just ran out of time. If you don’t believe that, read the piece linked here in The Hill, in which various House Republicans are already speculating how the bill will ultimately be killed in the Senate, maybe by the same group of RINOs who killed the Obamacare bill.

Hell, you’ve even got the Chairman of Senate Finance, Utah Senator Orin Hatch – who is likely to retire next year, and thus never have to face the voters again – talking about ways to kill the effort in public. The probable truth is that Mitch McConnell already has 8 or 9 members of his GOP caucus who can be counted on to vote against any version of a tax reform bill if he needs them.

They’ll couch their votes with objections like Hatch’s, i.e., “I feel very strongly we need to preserve that wonderful deduction for state and local taxes, oh my”. Maybe Susan Collins’ objection will be her strong feeling that we need to give a special tax credit to any woman who seeks an abortion at Planned Parenthood clinics; Lamar Alexander might want to preserve some special tax break for his state’s whiskey distillers; Lisa Murkowski might feel strongly about the need to preserve some tax program that benefits polar bears; John McCain might think he’s voting on the EPA appropriations bill rather than a tax bill; regardless, the three GOP ‘no’ votes needed to kill this thing are already out there in some combination of senators or another.

I hate to be the bearer of this bad news because we really do need to reform our absurd tax system, but watching this all play out is like going to a movie whose previews have already revealed the final scene. You already know how it’s going to end, but you go anyway just to see the details of how it all plays out.

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

It occurs to me this morning that, in the midst of all the hoopla over the unmasking of Trump campaign participants by the evil Obama minions, Donald Trump, both as candidate and as President, has actually perpetrated the greatest unmasking campaign in American history. Bear with me here – this is going to take about 700 words to explain:

Hey, what if the NFL had a game and all the players stood for the national anthem? I didn’t watch, but apparently that’s what happened on Thursday night, as the backlash from fans to all the idiotic kneeling nonsense has created a sudden wave of patriotic panic, er, fervor among NFL players and executives.

Sorry guys, but it’s really just too late. You’ve allowed your social justice warrior players to dismiss about 20% of your fan base over the past two seasons, and most of them just aren’t coming back. Your lame explanations for your unpatriotic actions fell on deaf ears for one simple reason: The blue collar, middle class, very patriotic guys and gals who make up the biggest part of your fan base are becoming increasingly “woke”, as all the kids and SJWs like to put it, thanks mainly to the guy they put in the White House. In other words, you’ve been unmasked by Donald Trump.

That public woke-ness means that the standard lines of BS propaganda aren’t going to work on your fans like they used to, and it will probably take you the rest of this season and maybe longer to figure that out. By the time you do figure that out, your players’ antics, leftist commentators and boring, tedious games will probably have alienated another 10-15% of your previous audience, and your contract re-negotiations with the TV networks in 2020 will become a horrifying situation for you. And that’s good, because you richly deserve the fate you have created for yourselves. You’ve earned it.

Speaking of standard lines of BS not working on the average American, The Washington Post reports ona new study conducted by professors at Cal-Berkeley and Stanford that reveals what anyone who really watched Donald Trump’s campaign flogging of Hillary Clinton and her billion dollar ad machine already knows: that “Advertising and campaign contacts have almost no measurable persuasive impact, at least in general elections.” Go figure.

Throughout the 2015 and 2016 campaign, I repeatedly pointed out that the reason why we saw literally every political professional and advertising executive rooting for Hillary was due to the simple fact that Donald Trump was proving them to be a waste of time and money. He wasn’t using these people, other than a revolving door of a handful of senior advisors, because he didn’t need them.

Trump’s whole campaign consisted of getting up at 4 in the morning, doing telephone interviews on Fox, CNN and MSNBC before Hillary’s alarm clock had gone off, then hopping on his jet and flying off for 2 or 3 raucus campaign rallies in different states every day. By noon each day, Trump had personally touched more voters than Hillary’s pervasive, ubiquitous advertising budget could touch in a week.

So the DC political campaign and advertising class hated Trump – and still hates him – because he clearly demonstrated that they are pretty much all a waste of time and money. He totally unmasked them.

This new study further reinforces what Trump already knew: “The best estimate for the persuasive effects of campaign contact and advertising — such as mail, phone calls, and canvassing — on Americans’ candidate choices in general elections is zero,” Kalla and Broockman write. “Our best guess for online and television advertising is also zero, but there is less evidence” in these cases.

The GOP runoff election in Alabama this week provides further support for this conclusion. Luther Strange was able to out-spend Roy Moore by about 6 to 1 on advertising, thanks to huge injections of money from the DC political class. But he lost by 10% of the vote despite the supposed advantages of incumbency and influence and even the wrong-headed endorsement from President Trump for the simple reason that he was identified by the voters as being a tool of that same DC political class. In other words, he had been unmasked.

The big takeaway here is this: The main reason why President Trump is so viscerally hated by so many different classes of people is because he has systematically shown the public their true nature. The NFL hates him because he’s called out their league’s utter lack of patriotism; the fake news media hates him because he’s called out its rampant dishonesty; the Democrats hate him because he’s called them out for their anti-American mendacity; the establishment Republicans hate him because he’s called out their laziness and ineffectiveness; and the DC political campaign and advertising class hates him because he’s revealed their irrelevance.

It’s the greatest unmasking in American political history. Real Americans should be very thankful to the President for his willingness to take the time to do it.